


Soulmate Words and Solemn Promises

by little-smartass (Linxcat)



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, Mentions of self-harm, allusions to potential unrequited raven/charles, due to the nature of the au several characters die, soulmate's last words to you tattooed on your skin au, very very vague allusions to child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 12:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4060093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linxcat/pseuds/little-smartass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They are my soulmate words," he tells her, beaming, "The last thing my soulmate will ever say to me. Everyone has them."</p><p>She thinks, that is the saddest idea I have ever heard, but she doesn't say it because Charles is smiling so brightly and he has been so good to her, she doesn't want to see him upset. "I don't have them." she insists, realising she is lying as the words leave her mouth.</p><p>"You must do. Everyone does."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soulmate Words and Solemn Promises

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt at introspective movieverse!Mystique (following the second timeline created in DoFP so not canon to the original trilogy) if the concept from [this text post](http://sincereglomp.tumblr.com/post/118727783452/aceofultron-soulmate-au-where-instead-of-your) existed in their universe.

When Raven is a child, she tries to ignore the words on her skin. She does not understand their significance; they are just strange shapes printed between the raised areas of scaling on her right wrist, and her body holds enough fear within it already. When she is alone -  _after_ \- she sits in the shadows of an alleyway, coughs up the water in her lungs, and runs her fingers over them. She knows letters but these are all wrong, squat and unfamiliar.

 

* * *

 

She has lived with Charles three weeks when he shyly asks her what her words are. When she is confused, he unbuttons his shirt and shows her the phrase printed over his heart;  _I will protect them, Charles._

"They are my soulmate words," he tells her, beaming, "The last thing my soulmate will ever say to me. Everyone has them."

She thinks,  _that is the saddest idea I have ever heard_ , but she doesn't say it because Charles is smiling so brightly and he has been so good to her, she doesn't want to see him upset. "I don't have them." she insists, realising she is lying as the words leave her mouth.

"You must do.  _Everyone_ does."

Hesitantly, Raven holds out her arm. Her young heart sinks when she sees his face crease in a frown.

"These aren't English letters. I don't know what language this is." Then his eyes alight with mischief and he grins at her, "Maybe your soulmate is an  _alien_."

"No!"

Charles scrambles to his feet and uses his pointer fingers to make antenna, "Beep-boop! Raven, I love you, beep-boop!"

She shoves him, he shoves her back, and they play-fight for hours.

 

* * *

 

When she's twelve, Raven melts her skin to pale pink so she can show Charles' French tutor her words.

"Do you know what language they are?" Charles asks excitedly.

"Please." Raven adds, just to see the proud smile Charles directs her way.

The man takes her wrist and examines the string of shapes. Abruptly, he yanks his hand away, as if touching her may contaminate him.

"That's Russian." he explains stiffly, and although Raven doesn't know much about international politics, his tone makes clear that Russian is a rather terrible thing to be. He eyes her with undisguised disdain, "You better hope your soulmate isn't a Commie."

Charles sees the look on her face and gives his tutor a migraine for the rest of the day.

"I could learn Russian and translate it for you." he offers, hours later, as they lie outside on the grass and watch the sun set.

Because she is twelve and lonely and can't imagine loving anyone else more than she loves her brother, Raven blurts, "Wouldn't it be funny if you learnt Russian and then - and then this was the last thing you told me, and it turned out you were my soulmate all along?"

Charles props himself up on his elbows, gives her a strange look, then bursts out laughing, "That would be  _stupid_ \- you're my sister! Come on, lets go inside."

Raven covers her crushed heart with a smile and thinks,  _I never believed in this stupid stuff anyway._

 

* * *

 

When she's seventeen, she turns her skin and sleeps with a human boy. It is disappointing and rather messier than she was expecting, but he seems pleased. As he pulls his jeans back on, she notices the printed text across his pale thigh -  _Did you lock the door?_ He sees her looking and smirks.

"Creepy, huh? Its like some sort of horror movie shit."

Raven nods, smiling, unsure as to why he's so please about such a morbid idea.

"What does yours say?" he asks, hauling his shirt over his head.

"'Goodnight'." she lies, as she has done to every human who has ever asked, conjuring the word upon the underside of her foot to show him, "I'm probably going to die in my sleep, or something."

"Boring." the boy says with a yawn, then walks out.

 

* * *

 

She's young and naive when she meets Hank McCoy, so when they have a quiet moment together, she takes a deep breath and asks, "Do you speak Russian?"

He gives her a weird look, "No?"

He turns back to his microscope and she watches him for a few seconds, and then tries again, "Have you ever thought about learning it?"

This time he doesn't even look up. "Not really. Languages were never really my thing. I prefer math. Why?"

Raven shrugs dismissively, pushing down the twinge of sadness, "Oh, just curious."

When he shows her a hypodermic syringe and tells her that her blue skin will never be beautiful, the disappointment eases just a little. Though her heart breaks all the same.

 

* * *

 

She slips off her clothes and climbs into Erik's bed and she is so stung from Hank's rejection that she genuinely thinks its a good idea. She's angry, he's  _always_ angry, why can't they be angry together?

When he kisses her blue lips and her heart flip-flops, she wonders absently if he speaks Russian.

When he pulls off his turtleneck and she sees the words printed on his skin over his heart -  _Promise me you will protect them, Erik_ \- she stops thinking that this is a good idea. She lets him fuck her, though, because he's the most attractive man she's ever met and she's burning up with her own fury and hurt, and, god, is it a  _crime_ to want to be wanted for once?

As soon as he's finished, she leaves, repeating like a mantra in her head,  _I never believed in that shit anyway. I never believed in that shit anyway. I never_   _ **believed**._

 

* * *

 

When she first meets Azazel - when he kills the CIA agents at the base and she screams and cowers like a child - she is too overwhelmed by her own fear to register the significance of his accent, and on the beach in Cuba she does not hear him speak.

So it is not until they arrive in the dingy abandoned hotel that is to become their base and she, still reeling from her first experience with teleportation, overhears Azazel talking to Erik - it is not until right then that she realises this assassin, her new brother-in-arms, is Russian.

 _There are millions of people who speak Russian_ , she tells herself,  _My soulmate can't be a murderer._

When they meet the next day to discuss liberating Emma Frost and all study the map together, she catches Azazel staring; not at her body, as she might have expected, but at their hands on the table, side by side, blood red and royal blue. The colours clash, but not in an unappealing way.

She makes sure to hide the words on her wrist whenever she is near him.

 

* * *

 

Raven has been afraid her whole life but she is determined that Mystique will be fearless, so she seeks out the person who terrifies her most to teach her how.

"I want to fight." she tells Azazel determinedly, and he agrees to instruct her with one of his devil-smiles.

She is still afraid of him and the terrible things he has done, the horrors she has seen him commit, but she learns new things about him too. Stoic, grim-faced Azazel can be charming, when he wants to be, and has both a very dry sense of humour and the patience of a saint. He treats her with a kind of respect she's never experienced before from the men in her life; he does not baby her like Charles or repudiate her like Hank, or manipulate her like Erik.

Ultimately, he treats her as an equal.

The first time she manages to knock him to the ground and get a knife to his throat in their training, Azazel looks up at her, winded and bruised, like she's the sun and moon and stars. She kisses him because it seems like the right thing to do, and because she wants to feel his red skin under her hands.

Afterwards, when they lie curled together in his bed, he strokes his calloused fingers over the words on her wrist with gentleness she could not have predicted him capable of.

"They are in Russian," he breathes, a vulnerability in his tone - hope, perhaps, "Do you know what they say?"

She moves his hand away and rests it on her hip instead, "Don't tell me. I don't want my whole life to be a countdown."

He nods slowly, frowning, and she knows he considers this a very solemn promise. As she rolls on top of him to begin again, she sees words on the inside of his right wrist in English. She makes a point of not reading them.

 

* * *

 

Kurt is born almost a year later. He is a delight, he is her very heart and soul, he is her bright spark of hope in the miserable world around her. But she is frustrated and stir-crazy after being confined to the Brotherhood headquarters for her last trimester, so, two months later, when Erik makes clear his plans to go to Dallas, she demands to go with him.

When she hugs Kurt and coos her goodbyes to him, Azazel squeezes her shoulder. "Ty vsegda v moih mysljah." He tells her, with a smile.

It is a kind of joke between them, that phrase; he says it to her every time she leaves for a job. He told her it meant 'return home safely', however he is a truly terrible liar and she suspects that it means something else entirely. Usually, she would laugh at the poorly-disguised mischief in his eyes, but this is the first time she will leave her baby for more than a few hours, so she can't quite muster it.

Erik - no,  _Magneto_ now - sticks his head around the door and says they need to leave, his contact will meet them in a few minutes, so she takes a deep breath, transfers Kurt back into his father's arms and - mostly for her own benefit - says, "Everything will be fine. I'll be back in three days, tops."

She turns away, knowing that if she looks back and sees Kurt's face she'll never be able to leave.

Later, when she runs the moment over and over in her mind, she thinks she remembers seeing something freeze in Azazel's expression as she spoke. She wonders how he was able to let her walk away, and whether she would have been able to do the same in his position.

 

* * *

 

She is not back in three days. To say that the Dallas job goes poorly would be a gross understatement.

Four weeks later, she limps back to the headquarters alone to find nothing but a burnt-out husk. There are no bodies and there is no sign of her baby, but there are old darkened bloodstains and bullet shells scattered liberally.

Somehow, deep inside of her, she just knows.

She screams her pain to the sky until her throat is raw, then staggers away into the dark. That night, when she lies curled up in a cheap hotel bed, too numb to cry or sleep, she scrabbles at the words on her wrist until she bleeds. If she had known that was the end, could she have stopped it? If she'd turned back one last time and spoken more words to him, might he have lived? Was there any way she could have cheated the curse printed into her flesh?

Ты всегда в моих мыслях. The words stand starkly out from her skin and mock her  with neverending what-ifs.

She claws at them and the blood that seeps onto the pillowcase is the colour of his skin.

 

* * *

 

She finds Trask and is ready to kill him, ready to take her first life in vengeance for her friends and lover and her baby boy, when things go horribly wrong. There's Charles and Erik and Hank and another man, then there are the autopsy reports that are a terrible kind of confirmation and turn her stomach to jelly and her resolve to steel, and then there's the White House and the shot she never took, and she hobbles away.

She does what she does best; she infiltrates, and manages to find the man that stood with her brother in that room in Paris and fought Erik on the White House lawn. She instructs them to pull him from the river because a man with his talents is a helpful ally. Only, something is wrong, and he doesn't remember any of the events she describes. His name is Jim, he tells her.

They end up having sex on a desk in a lab they've just decimated together. Its rough and adrenaline-fuelled and she cannot honestly say she enjoys it, but they both feel stronger afterwards. As he pulls back, she catches sight of a single word printed on his hipbone -  _Logan?_ \- but he sees her looking and self-consciously pulls down his shirt. Mystique started covering her own words with a new stretch of scales a long time ago, so she thinks it is fair enough.

They part ways soon after. She does not miss him.

 

* * *

 

A year later, Mystique takes on the face of a respectable-looking human and visits a library. Over the course of the afternoon she pieces together Russian Cyrillic until she understands the words on her skin.

 _You are always in my mind_.

She runs her fingers lightly over the print on her wrist, then brings it to her heart, like a promise.

 

* * *

 

Two days later, new words blossom across her blank left wrist. They are in English, this time.

 _You will be happy again_.

Six months after that, she meets Irene Adler.

 

* * *

 

Irene is upfront and strong-willed and Mystique loves to watch the way her delicate hands work, whether she is carefully pouring a teapot or tightly gripping a submachine gun. They are like old friends on the day they meet, Irene already having seen so much of their life together and eager, so eager, to begin it.

As they lie tangled in bed one evening, Irene's thin fingers find Mystique's left wrist and caress the raised flesh there that spells out the words. Mystique reciprocates on the dark letters printed on the pale skin of Irene's arm, then presses their pulse points together reverently.

"Do you want me to tell you what they say?" she asks.

Irene smiles sadly at her, "Oh, my dear, I already know what the last things we say to each other will be."

Mystique swallows hard and hides her pain with kisses.

 

* * *

 

She barely had eighteen months with Azazel, but she and Irene live out three glorious decades together.

Marie passes through their care, and although she slips like sand between their fingers, Mystique does her best to love her, for the sake of the baby boy she lost.

And then - not lost. Her reunion with Kurt is more painful than she could have imagined it to be; she thinks,  _I wish your father could see you_ , and they part ways, and still, life goes on.

There are fights. There are wars. Some they win, most they do not.

Irene ages. Mystique does not.

She loses her lover in a bitter and anticlimactic hospital bed after a brutal battle. Mystique takes her hand and begs, "Stay with me," and knows Irene will not.

Irene kisses her blue knuckles and says, "You will be happy again," like its a solemn promise, and then says no more.

Mystique stands in the rain and wants to believe that it is true.

 

* * *

 

Two years later, Mystique meets Kurt again, and they have time to talk. Her son is still a stranger to her, but he, with his ever gentle heart, has forgiven her of her wrongdoings.

They sit together. Kurt asks and she answers. She holds out her right wrist and tells him of his father, of Azazel with his sharp smile and dry wit, his blue eyes and red, red skin. She holds out her left wrist and tells him of Irene, with her fluttering hands and bright laughter and ever-present knowing sadness.

"He must have teleported you away to safety, when they attacked." she explains, entreating her son to understand.

Kurt nods slowly, looking thoughtful. This has been a lot for him to take in.

"If I'd known where you were, I would have come to find you." she says, and as the words leave her mouth she herself is unsure as to the truth of them.

Kurt seems to know though; he turns his golden gaze on her and there's something like pity in his eyes.

There is a lump in her throat. She walks away and hopes there is room in his big heart to forgive her one more time.

 

* * *

 

The sky rains fire and she knows in her old, tired soul that this will be the end. The troops are readying for one last push but they are not troops, they are nothing but children in her eyes;  _her_ children. Kurt and Marie have both christened their yellow uniforms with the blood of their attackers and, oh god, this is not the life she wanted for them. This is not the life she abandoned her paralysed brother to fight for.

Numb, she watches her reflection in a huge shard of metal that Magneto used his last breath to rip apart. She forswore fear the day she gave up Raven, the day she left that beach in Cuba, and to her satisfaction she finds none of it in Mystique's eyes. She hears rallying cries from the other end of the valley and the sky splits with lightning. Storm calls her ragged band of soldier to her side one last time. But still Mystique lingers, studying herself in the smooth metal; bruises, gashes, a burn that extends along her shoulder and has gone too deep to heal properly, a grimy bandage around one ankle.

And then her eye catches the dark print on the inside of her wrists. They have been fighting for weeks with scarce food and barely time to rest. She is too exhausted to cover up her words, and what would be the point? Their bodies are decades in the ground now and in all likelihood she will join them by nightfall.

She twists her forearms to examine them in the murky half-light of dawn. Azazel on the right, Irene on the left, they are stark reminders of what she has lost in this fruitless fight. And yet, here at the end of days, there is a strange kind of comfort in having some part of them still with her.

 _If I survive this_ , she prays to the God she does not believe in,  _Please, do not give me another._

Abruptly, rain begins to pour from the sky above her. If there were not a weather witch among the last survivors, she would think it a solemn promise from the heavens that her prayer has been answered.

 


End file.
